1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a reusable assembled box to be used, stacked in a container, for transport of parts.
2. Description of the Related Art
For transport of parts, particularly transport of parts to overseas in complete knocked-down (CKD) system, a method of transport employed is that a number of boxes packed with the parts are stacked in a container for transport, and as a box for packing each of the parts, conventionally, a general corrugated fiberboard box (which is in a prism shape and a base and a lid of the box are formed by folding back a lower and upper ends of the corrugated fiberboard respectively) is used.
With such corrugated fiberboard box, the box can hardly be reused after the transport, since at least the base thereof is protected against deflection by means of a gum tape or the like adhered thereto when the box is packed with the parts for transport.
Therefore, normally, the corrugated fiberboard box or the like once used is burned down or sent out as a material for making a recycled paper.
In the situation, a proposition is made for a simple assembling-type reusable box such as disclosed in Japanese Utility Model Application No. 10-2244 (Japanese Utility Model Registration No. 3052184) shown in FIGS. 3.
To make the simple assembling-type reusable box, a sheet of a board-like body is folded upright to form flaps 106, 107, and 108 to be side walls as shown in FIG. 3A, thus a hollow rectangular box as shown in FIG. 3B is formed, and then four corners of the box are coupled by box corners 130 to 133 respectively to form a packing box.
At each of the corners, as shown in FIG. 3C, protrusions 124 and 125 in the box corner are respectively inserted to grooves 141 and 142 provided on upper portions of the flaps to be mutually coupled for retaining the whole shape of the box.
Since there is an external edge 123 formed upright on upper edge of each of the box corners at a position slightly external thereto, respective assembling-type reusable boxes packed with the parts can be stacked in a container (not shown) as shown in FIG. 3D for transport.
With appearance of such an assembling-type reusable box, it becomes easier to reuse the box, however, in order to send back the box to the source of the parts while keeping the box in a reusable state, the box of the above-described conventional example still has a problem of a higher transport cost since the box has a larger area when extended.
Therefore, when the box is packed for sending back for reuse, it is forcibly folded into a smaller piece, thus a folded edge is damaged by an unreasonable folding force, in addition to a large amount of labor required in the folding work, causing a tendency that recycling frequency is decreased. Particularly, when a box needing a certain degree of depth is formed, the tendency is obvious. Furthermore, in such a conventional box, since the box is formed by assembling a sheet of board-like body having a large area, strength of a base thereof is limited, therefore it is customary to add the other board-like body to the base for reinforcement thereof, and as a result there issues also a risk of losing it during transport.